


énouement

by mooselady



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Angst, Melodrama, Sad, i dont know what im doing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-24
Updated: 2016-11-24
Packaged: 2018-09-01 21:44:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8639374
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mooselady/pseuds/mooselady
Summary: a meeting in the void





	

In retrospect to the current predicament, she believed this was her fault. 

It was numb at first. Emily stared ahead, flat on her back, looking up and seeing nothing but the endless black on grey Void ahead of her. There was no up, no down, no beginning or end. A moment of relief washed over her.

She had fled in time, it seemed.

In the next instant she shivered against the cold, a smile already forming on her lips as she breathed in, hoping to exhale a deep, warm, human sigh.

It was pain that met her, so sharp and so sudden that she cried out loud. Her eyes went wide, and she put her hand over her mouth, blinking, tensing her body and going very, very still. 

It happened anyway.

The pain shot like ice from a place just beneath her ribcage. Emily placed her other hand onto the spot, feeling the warm stickiness.

A strange noise hissed in her ear. She jerked her head away, closing her eyes shut tight, her mouth pursing in an O to try to control her breathing. 

It was happening against her will, a pain so deep, so embedded into her very marrow that tears welled in her eyes, a hot lump forming in her throat. 

“Somewhere, someone is singing their newborn to sleep.”

The woman jerked her hand, raising it to block her face as if she were avoiding her eyes from the sun. 

The blood was running cold.

“And even now, someone, somewhere wishes they were being sang to.”

No wasted breath, she told herself. No wasted movement. 

She placed her elbows to the hard rocky surface and tried lifting herself up, but gasped, so shocked by the splicing pain shooting over her abdomen that her body gave way, causing her to hit the ground with an audible thud.

She felt his presence before he spoke again.

“Kaldwin. No better than the alley cat, but none more swift than the swallow. You are exhausted.”

Emily clenched her jaw, eyes still closed. Her hands refused to relax, balled into fists by her sides. 

She raised her hands, battered and bruised, shakily letting them cover the wound.

There was silence. A low moan echoed the emptiness of this place, this desolate Void. 

_Am I going to die here?_

It was too soon to utter those words, Emily berated herself. Her mission was not over.

But the pain came once more like a wave, the sharp edge of a knife finding its way deeper, brined with blood and frothing sea foam. 

She allowed herself to roll her head, open her eyes, and stare straight into the obsidian blackness before her. 

He was cold. It caused her to lurch, coughing blood in the opposite direction. When she turned to scowl at him again, realizing this pain _must_ have a face, it must have a real sentient form, he was gone. 

Emily strained to look into the darkness, her cheek pressed against the rock. 

The blood condensed, and then it split, a ribbon of red flowing from the corner of her mouth.

“Tell me Empress. Your pain. Is this the worst you can bring upon yourself?”

Emily did not flinch this time. Overhead a corpse of great magnitude, a creature mourning low and timelessly passed by, its shadow causing her throat to close. In a flash of panic she fought for air, and this only caused a waver in her voice as she hissed, turning to look at him, 

“Do not patronize me.”

She lurched, coughing, the skin of her nose scraping harshly against jagged rock. 

The Outsider did not glance at the spots of blood that now flecked his coat. Instead he touched two fingers against the red, peering at her as she cried out, inconceivably at no one in particular except to the unavoidable fate that awaited her, “ _ **Damn you**_!”

Her hand slapped at the ground, and she tore at it, long nails gathering enough pebbles for her to toss them in any direction but here on this slab of rock, where she was sure she would die.

He moved from the onslaught of pebbles, asking above the din of her outcry, “Does it hurt?”

“Of _**course**_ it hurts,” she seethed, a splinter of such raw anger in her voice, in her eyes, that the Outsider wavered.

He watched her as these last reserves of adrenaline caused her to crane her neck back, eyes following the thin line of some horizon that didn’t exist.

“But do you know?” she asked, her voice rising and falling with strained force. “Do you know what it’s like to be in pain?”

She continued, her eyes meeting his for a moment, before she looked away, clutching at her side.

“To feel what I’ve felt in life, and not just in this moment?”

The Outsider narrowed his gaze, tilting his head. 

It was not a perplexing question to ask. 

The blood was draining from her face, but she kept looking not at him but at something else. The horizon. As if someone would appear as a dark silhouette any moment now.

Always one for fantasy, he believed, furrowing his brow. Decidedly he answered.

“I’ve felt pain, in all the ways a mortal life should feel. Sorrow, loss. Abandonment. Fear.”

The winds shuddered around them, screaming alive, creeping over shadows and light, snarling in hunger. 

The Outsider smothered the tips of his fingers in the blood, setting his jaw, closing his eyes to smell at the frigid air around them.

“I want to go home,” a voice whispered.

It was frail. Long ago a voice like this one piped up from the shadows of a room. Frightened and alone, a little girl kept her knees close to her chest and admitted in all the ways mortal pain can permit, 

“ _I want to go home_.”

But the voice came as a distant memory, an echo from the past, because before it could be coddled and doted on, a woman’s voice shrieked shrill in the cold of the void.

The Outsider tensed, disappearing into the formless shadows of his self before returning father away.

She was crying. It gurgled with the blood in her mouth. Defiantly she gnashed her teeth, hissing a loud breath, turning to spit the blood from her mouth. Her knees bent, the bottom of her boots scraping against the rock before returning with a sudden calmness, a stillness that wasn’t there before.

And still she fought.

The Outsider moved to her side, hands behind his back, neck bent. He looked above and around and beside them. Decidedly he sat beside her again, cross-legged, the hem of his knee soaking into the blood. 

“I think you know more of loss

I think it haunts you every day.”

Emily and the Outsider listened. 

It whispered above their heads.

“One goes home

One, one will follow.

Has followed. 

Always follows.”

Emily blinked against the dizziness, her neck going limp. It felt like sleep, she imagined. Somewhere, in another distant time and place, her mother had hoped she wouldn’t always sleep in her bed alone.

“You know pain,” the Empress stated. She didn’t know when her head had been placed in his lap. He was warmer than she remembered.

Or maybe her heart wanted to believe that whatever was good and forgiving would come to her in amnesty.

“-But you will never know peace.”

The corner of her mouth turned, a weak chuckle escaping from her throat.

The Outsider, both old and young alike, leaned down, his chin brushing against her forehead. Her brow furrowed, face creasing as if to cry. 

“Neither will you.”

She continued to stare into the huddled chest of a being she would never understand, nor possibly could return any grievance for, real or imagined. This close she smelled the strangeness on his coat; a smell that made her crinkle her nose and blink away the coldness, the sharp tang of metal. 

The blood smeared across her face, the Empress lifted a hand, unsure of where to point, or what to ask, or what to do. She raised a hand, one befitting of a ruler but trained to be a killer, and poised it at the Outsider’s throat, at the vulnerable point where words rattled forth like sea hymns. 

“Was this the last feeling of fear for you? Of pain?”

The Outsider did not answer. His chest rose and fell with practiced indifference, but a jitteriness washed over her, a swell of panic and sadness and pain in the heart slithering its way into her veins. A final moment locked inside a body, now coursing through her blood. Silently she believed she understood, even as he answered, reaching up and grazing his blood stained fingers over his throat.

“There’s always new ways to find fear Emily.”

Darkness crept into her eyes. She wondered aloud how better it would be, truly, to have run away when she had the chance.

“I tried to fight it.”

The empty black spaces between the stars were realized.

“I’ll see you when you wake.”


End file.
